I'm a gringo and have driven all over NW Mexico: BCS/BCN and Sonora. So cities: Guaymas, Nogales, Puerto Peñasco, Mexicali, Tijuana, Ensenada, La Paz, Cabo, etc. With my wife and occasional daughter, we've city-hiked extensively CDMX, Querétaro, Guadalajara, Oaxaca, and by design not the wealthiest areas. Also by design we are happiest when we're the only gringos around, for instance in a restaurant. We all stick out prominently. I hiked across lower middle class Guadalajara and rode the new subway back to the centro and I had nothing but positive interactions the whole way.
In summary every one of these trips has been a positive experience with nary a rotten situation, although one has to be careful on the further reaches of the Metro de la Ciudad de México. Even then, behavior matters, and I've extricated us from a possibly escalatory situation by just acting like a native, no problemo.
Even done the early Sunday traffic ticket (in Guaymas) with a few hours cooling our heels at (not in) the police station before la mordita set us free. We were finally brought before el jefe, and had to listen to an impenetrable Sonoran dialect harangue (I couldn't pick out the numbers!). When he paused for a while, I respectfully fanned $150US or so of pesos in front of him, he picks the fine. About $80US. Not rotten though. Rotten is when you find yourself adjacent to near future health issues.
I read various Mexico news sites in Spanish and the facts are if you are a low status Mexicano not living close to a city center it seems occasionally quite gruesome. In the US our family has explored the deepest wildernesses by ourselves all over the country, and never had a problem[1]. In México I wouldn't dare do such a thing. I also wouldn't travel at night outside of the nice areas of city centers.
If you want to learn more about what it's like for the low status Mexicanos working extraordinarly hard to make a living in the rural areas of Mexico, I highly recommend the recent (poorly edited and overly verbose) book "Searching For Modern Mexico". He has a section focusing on the avocado industry situation, which is just awful. My heart goes out to those people.
We're all converging in Tijuana soon to spend a while in Ensenada, including snorkeling south of Ensenada not that far from where those poor surfers had the ultimate rotten experience. => give up the vehicle, walk out.
We love Mexico.
[1] Uh... well there was that one time decades ago when we were hiking on a remote trail in the N. Georgia mountains and we got held up at gunpoint by a bandido in flip flops(!). I gave him the $2 in my wallet and we hiked back out of there pronto!.
I'm Mexican and have lived here all my 30 years of life on the Northeast side. You and your family will be safe. Cartels avoid messing with foreigners—too much heat. Look up Kiki Camarena. They (Cartels) are never as bad in the eyes of foreigners.
The low-status Mexicans working extraordinarily hard to make a living in the rural areas of Mexico have it bad, yes. They're usually exposed to minor crimes such as assaults.
But the biggest issue in Mexico is that you can't stand out. Middle, upper-middle, and high-class individuals (before having enough money to afford bodyguards) try to keep a low profile. There is a real risk that someone may want to kidnap you for as low as 25k USD. Even if you want to pay the ransom, something can go south and end badly. Crimes that are catastrophic if they happen to you.
You can't really have an apples-to-apples comparison of how safe something is because it is context-dependent. I may feel "safer" in South Chicago compared to an American, as I don't quite grasp how or why it is unsafe.
Muchas gracias, I am but a beginner still in Mexican Spanish, however my only slightly engaged over the years gringo brain remembers "mordita" instead of "mordida".
google translate says for both: "bite".
I have slightly worried for a long time that nuance will be lost via translate devices, and here we are.
Because I learned this from informal situations in the US something like 30 years ago, it stuck. But, surprise, surprise, the pronunciation was just an approximation, and led me astray.
In summary every one of these trips has been a positive experience with nary a rotten situation, although one has to be careful on the further reaches of the Metro de la Ciudad de México. Even then, behavior matters, and I've extricated us from a possibly escalatory situation by just acting like a native, no problemo. Even done the early Sunday traffic ticket (in Guaymas) with a few hours cooling our heels at (not in) the police station before la mordita set us free. We were finally brought before el jefe, and had to listen to an impenetrable Sonoran dialect harangue (I couldn't pick out the numbers!). When he paused for a while, I respectfully fanned $150US or so of pesos in front of him, he picks the fine. About $80US. Not rotten though. Rotten is when you find yourself adjacent to near future health issues.
I read various Mexico news sites in Spanish and the facts are if you are a low status Mexicano not living close to a city center it seems occasionally quite gruesome. In the US our family has explored the deepest wildernesses by ourselves all over the country, and never had a problem[1]. In México I wouldn't dare do such a thing. I also wouldn't travel at night outside of the nice areas of city centers.
If you want to learn more about what it's like for the low status Mexicanos working extraordinarly hard to make a living in the rural areas of Mexico, I highly recommend the recent (poorly edited and overly verbose) book "Searching For Modern Mexico". He has a section focusing on the avocado industry situation, which is just awful. My heart goes out to those people.
We're all converging in Tijuana soon to spend a while in Ensenada, including snorkeling south of Ensenada not that far from where those poor surfers had the ultimate rotten experience. => give up the vehicle, walk out.
We love Mexico.
[1] Uh... well there was that one time decades ago when we were hiking on a remote trail in the N. Georgia mountains and we got held up at gunpoint by a bandido in flip flops(!). I gave him the $2 in my wallet and we hiked back out of there pronto!.